


White Water Writing

by Llwellyn



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Chloe Price Lives, F/F, Max is gone
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-18 14:47:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29491548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Llwellyn/pseuds/Llwellyn
Summary: Something happened after a week from hell.Chloe's memories end at the farewell kiss by the lighthouse and they start again two days later.Nothing in between.Kate finds her outside Max's room with a tree branch in her hands, sleeping. She's sick, dirty and smell of fire smoke and forest.And Max is gone.
Relationships: Kate Marsh/Chloe Price, Maxine "Max" Caulfield/Chloe Price
Kudos: 6





	1. Chapter 1

She was, obviously, trapped. 

That was the first thing she realised. They had tied her legs together and she could not move her right arm. Idiots. They had left her left arm free! Taking stock of her surroundings she noticed that the very comfortable bed she was in was quite wet and getting cold, and the cozy room was dark, quite warm and eerily familiar. She shuddered. Someone stirred at the other end of the otherwise silent room. She lay perfectly still, quiet as a mouse. Someone rose and shuffled over to her bedside and bent down over her.

“You awake?”

With all the might she could muster she swung her left fist at her unknown captor, who dodged it and grabbed her wrist.

“Chloe!”

She tried to get loose, to swing again, to scratch or grab a hold. She only knew she had to get free, she had to get away. She had to save Max! But she couldn’t escape the relatively small hand and its firm grip.

“Chloe! Stop it! It’s me!”

Her jailor was a woman. A little shorter than herself. But so strong.

“Let me go!”

“It’s ME!”

“Fuck you! Let go!”

“It’s me, Kate! You’re safe! You’re here. With me. We’re at my place.”

Her place. Here. Safe. Kate. Some pieces fell into place.

“Bun-bun?”

“Yes. It’s me. And it’s a silly nickname.”

“Why am I at your place?”

Kate sighed and let my hand go.

“I don’t know Chloe? I found you last night, sitting outside Max’s room, asleep, holding a tree branch. You were a mess. Still are. I tried to wipe your face.”

“Oh.”

They were both quiet for a while.

“Oookay.”

“Yeah.”

“This is odd.”

“I thought so.”

She was beginning to wake up, though her memories refused to arrive at central station.

“Two questions?”

“Sure.”

“Where is Max and why is the bed all wet?”

“What? Oh, it’s soaking! And your clothes are too! We have to get them off.” 

“Buy a girl dinner first.”

It wasn’t even my brain’s choice to make that joke. It came directly from the spine. Pure reflex. But Kate didn’t even seem to hear it.

“You’ll freeze in those. Here, change. It’s my sleep shirt, so it’s a bit large on me, but it’ll probably fit you. I have some underthings here.” 

She took something from a drawer, gave them to me and pressed her hand to my forehead.

”You do have a temperature.”

She went over to a drawer and started fiddling in it, came back and gave me some tylenol.

“Here, take two.”

“Yes ma'am.”

Somewhere she had gotten a glass of water. I took the tylenol and she re-filled the glass.

“Drink this too. I’ll change the sheets.”

She started doing so and I had managed to drink half the glass, when I started feeling woozy.

“Kate. I feel woozy.”

“Just a second. There, all done.”

My knees started to buckle, but she was ready for it.

“Whoa there. Come on, back to your bed. Here you go.”

She tucked me in and I was asleep just after the head hit the pillow, with my last conscious thoughts being: It’s not MY bed. And hey, wait a minute, she didn’t answer that one other one question I asked. And I think it was an important one too!


	2. Chapter 2

It was wet and she could see her breath.

Her head was resting against a really big log. The pre-joke part of her brain shuffled around and made her giggle. She decided no to do that kind of joke. Leave it to someone else. _It’s too easy - I’m not touching that._ She giggled again, at the second innuendo. Then giggled at the word “innuendo”. _God, Max is right, I'm really childish. I’m ok with that._

She could smell mushrooms, the ones with the big round hat that looked like a mushroom hat. She didn’t know! She wasn’t a mushroom person. Unless dried and psychedelic. These were wet. The log was wet too, and the yellow leaf, that looked a little like a broken star if you squinted at it, was also wet. The leaf was jibbed between a less interesting leaf and a crack in the wood.

A minuscule beetle on said leaf, hadn’t really thought its choice of hiking day through. If it could regret - that is what it would be doing.

A frustrated sigh to her right brought her back from her lilliputian ponderings and scaled up her focus from bug to log, via yellow leaves and mushroom hats all the way to realising that to her right, were two human-sized mice. This fact felt perfectly normal.

They were resting _their_ heads against the same log as Chloe. That was perfectly normal. 

The frustrated mouse, who she somehow knew as Deek swore a lot. Also now.

“God fuck Damn it! I _know_ I had the angle right!”

“Yeah. I hear you Deek, but keep it down. We don’t want to attract more of them if we don’t have to. And hey, maybe you got him yesterday. Just set the net, do the coordinates, drop the marker, shoot at the conflux and let’s HOPE nothing gets interesting.”

That was Lenny. That last bit he said in a practiced bored monotone. She knew they had done this several times before. Not because of how he said it. She knew it anyway. Somehow. Both mice were wearing those casual military clothes that definitely had a word that meant casual military clothes. She reasoned that it was probably not “tired pants”, which for some reason was her first idea. She knew that the mouse closest to her was Lenny and she was about to ask him about it, when she first realised that her pants were tired too, and second - saw that the bandage on Lenny’s right arm was starting to bleed through. She ought to say something.

“Hey Lenny.”

“Yeah Chloe, what’s up?”

“It’s starting to bleed through again.”

“Fuck. I’ve got to change it.”

Deek helped him, gingerly. Fussing.

“You’ve got to keep an eye on it.”

“Yeah mom.”

They were really sweet to each other, Chloe thought.

“Lenny.”

“Yes Chloe. What is it now?”

“Why are we in the woods again?”

Deek cursed again and Lenny sighed.

“Damn it! Again!?”

“What did I do?!”

“Oh, nothing. You just time-flipped again.”

“Did I?”

“What day is it?”

She was unsure. She knew one thing.

“It’s two days after the storm.”

“Well at least that’s promising.”

Deek looked at her, then to Lenny.

“She doesn’t look well though.”

There came a _weird_ sound, like withe noise mixed with a scream. _That would have been the worst relaxation CD ever._ She realised Deek and Lenny were screaming. She got a brief look at something she would have a hard time describing later. It looked the way static _sounds_. It looked how static would look if it had a face, could be angry and also was very angry at present. 

Very _very_ angry.

_TIME WRAITH!_ her subconscious was screaming. It was also screaming at her to get down, take cover, before it saw her. The mice _dragged_ her down behind the log, her being movie character slow at taking cover... 

Behind the log. Lenny and Deek brought up their guns. She felt suddenly woozy.

“Hey guys. I feel suddenly woozy.”

But her voice was lost in the subsequent gunfire. Her field of vision narrowed and then everything fades to black.

-

_She woke up in a ridiculously wet bed. Annoyed with this state and its affairs (the state being whatever room this was) she flipped the pillow and threw it on the floor. Snatched a blanket from somewhere whatever give me that blanket stupid room . She put the blanket on the floor next to the pillow and straightened it out somewhat. She then turned the duvet wet side out, and folded a bit at the top so that no wet part would insult her neck or chin. She turned on her side and promptly fell asleep._

-

There were no mice this time. Only a weird dream about going to the supermarket to buy a toothbrush and then carrying it home in a really big paper bag. 

**Author's Note:**

> Hi. This story is a sister-story to my fic "Three Blind Mice - a story by Chloe Price" and while they are totally stand alone I will be tickled pink if you read both!
> 
> This one will be updated temporally, unlike the last one that was dumped finished.
> 
> Intermittently yours, 
> 
> \- Llwellyn


End file.
